


Getting Mauled By a Wolverine is Not a Form Of Flirting

by Vrunka



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Fluff, M/M, Rare Pair, Slow Burn, animal death mention, oblivious characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2019-07-06 10:00:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15883782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vrunka/pseuds/Vrunka
Summary: But Rook is trying really hard to make it one.





	Getting Mauled By a Wolverine is Not a Form Of Flirting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gayfishman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayfishman/gifts).



> Qyoo you know what you did

Boomer has found something. He is baying, snarling; the feral, snap-jaw sound of it echoing through the trees. Rook shoulders his rifle. Body tense, alert.

There’s no screams, so it isn’t Peggies that have Boomer’s instincts going. He pulls the hunting bow from where he keeps it clipped atop his bag. He checks the string, runs his fingers along the curve of it. He only has three arrows left. Used them all on a moose that wandered into the road, was all bluster and speed and terrifying weight; and he hadn’t bought more after selling the skin like a dumb ass.

It’s a stupid mistake that wouldn’t matter so much normally.

But Hope County has proven itself to be one bumfuck of a bad place to make mistakes.

“Boomer,” he hisses. The ricocheting barks are disorienting; Rook never really considered himself an outdoorsman type before all this and now he has no choice but to be.

Skinning and hunting and fishing, living off the land. Killing Peggie converts because what the fuck else can he do.

He can still remember the first one he killed; the first human, god, god, god the first of countless fuckers since. He can remember the feel of his knife slicing too deep, hitting bone, the echo of it in his wrist and the sudden sure spurt of blood.

He had thrown up with Dutch in his ear, chiding him over the radio.

And now it’s like he doesn’t even notice.

Except now, fucking now, his dog is goddamn missing, somewhere in these goddamn woods, raging like a beast at whatever it is and Rook isn’t equipped to handle this. Wasn’t born for this sort of a life.

“Boomer!” He tries again. Sharper. More commanding. Hoping the dog will just materialize out of the trees, wagging his tail and ready to go...to go...well not home, Rook hasn’t found anywhere to fit that neat little distinction yet, but to go somewhere.

Somewhere not fucking here in the middle of the woods.

Maybe Boomer does hear him, there is a pause in the barking. A heartbeat, two, three, four.

The silence almost worse than the ruckus had been.

Rook stands stock still and waits.

The trees rustle in a breeze Rook can’t really feel. Autumn threatening. Whispering. Whispering.

Boomer barks. A higher pitch than his usual hunting bay, and Rook swings in that direction, pivots on his heel and heads off into the trees and the underbrush at a jog.

He doesn’t notice things getting weird until they are firmly, irrevocably wrong.

The floaty, twisting, disconnected feeling of bliss. Glow-y, Hurk calls it. Fucking weird is Grace’s term. Either way, Rook recognizes the feelings enough to know he’s wandered into trouble. Followed Boomer right in.

Something flutters by his ear, lazy and buzzing like a fly. Except it’s giggling. Wispy. Incorporeal.

Even fucking dead, Faith is a nuisance.

“Boomer!” Rook yells. Maybe? Hard to tell with the cotton-mouthed lingering of bliss fresh in his system. He grabs for the nearest tree, something to anchor him, keep him steady. He watches the sparks erupt from where he touches, sparkling, twirling lights spinning free from the bark. Glow-y. Yeah, glow-y is a pretty good word for it.

They twist and turn ahead of him, spiraling, spiraling past brown, speckled fur. Rook grins, reaches out.

He feels the teeth before he sees the danger.

Like little razors suddenly plucking at his arm. A hissed warning. Boomer’s yip, piercing through the bliss fog. Faith, spinning, ghostlike, dead, dead, dead, disappears in a shimmering cloud.

The wolverine goes nowhere.

Oh joy, of fucking joys.

It’s young, still pretty small, for a wolverine that is. Maybe the bliss has gotten to it too, worn it down some. Lucky for Rook, Boomer still seems mostly sober. God, sober, a dog for chrissake.

It’s lucky for Rook regardless of how ridiculous it is.

It is less lucky for the juvenile wolverine.

Boomer sends the thing flying, pounces on it like he’s part puma instead of hunting hound mutt. He’s all bared teeth and growling warning. All bristling fur and stiffened tail. Rook’s goddamn hero.

The two animals go tumbling over one another. The wolverine’s claws glittering, flashing. Rook shakes his head, trying to kick the bliss, the after effects. The wolverine is hissing and there is blood and Rook needs to fucking be doing something, now, now, now, now please.

He rolls. The bow trembles free from his blood-slippery grip. His blood, wolverine blood, Boomer’s, impossible to tell. Bliss has him too keyed up, riding that painkiller wave just a little longer.

Rook grabs for the knife on his belt instead. The reliable heft of it in his palm. He says Boomer’s name just before driving the knife home. The dog yelps, jumps away from the writhing ball of teeth and claws and fur. The point of the knife drives into the thing’s chest.

Lucky again, the blow doesn’t just fuel it into a greater rage. The wolverine heaves, once, twice more, then is still.

Rook falls back.

Boomer comes to his side. Panting. Blood on his flanks, under his belly. Gentle, Rook touches the areas. Bleeding alright, not just blowback from ripping the wolverine’s flesh open. Three deep gouges along Boomer’s belly.

The dog whines. Legs tense as Rook investigates the damage.

“Good boy,” Rook soothes. “Real hero, Boomer, you know that.”

Another whine, accompanied with a lick across Rook’s chin. The thumping of Boomer’s tail against the forest floor.

Such a goddamn good dog.

“Come on,” Rook says, pulling himself up, swaying slightly. The last receding weakness of the bliss. He closes his eyes. Opens them.

“Doc Lindsey will patch you right up,” he says. The dog’s head cocks to the side, like he can understand more than the tone or the warmth in Rook’s words.

The two of them, shaking, bleeding, much more sluggish than when they had entered, begin the long hike out of the forest.

—

Rook commandeers a car at the first road they find. He usually tries not to, is able to hike any and everywhere he needs to get to in the county, even if he hates the nature aspect of it.

But Boomer is slowing. Every step seems to drain the dog more and more, and Rook isn’t willing to risk any further injury.

He probably looks like a ghoul himself, stumbling out of the tree line, shirtless and blood splattered and wild eyed. Looks like an escaped victim of the Project. Maybe it’s why the woman exits her vehicle without a question.

Or maybe Rook has just garnered a reputation.

Savior of the River and all. Killer of the first Seed. Who knows.

Whatever the reason, the woman gets out of the car as soon as Rook knocks on the window. She watches, without a word as he helps Boomer into the backseat. As Rook gets himself into the front.

“Good luck,” she says as he shuts the door. Her lips still move, something more—“You’re a hero, you know?”—Rook pretends he didn’t hear her. He cranks the engine, speeds off toward the prison.

—

“A wolverine, you said?”

Doc Lindsey wears surprise really, really well. It fits his face so nicely. His shapely lips, his wide, wide eyes.

He’s got Boomer on the table, hands resting in the dog’s flank. Rook had had to carry him in here. Too weak by the time they arrived to carry himself.

Rook digs his fingers into his palm, even with his nails bitten to shit, the pressure is enough to make the wolverine wounds on his hands and arms hurt like glass is being shoved inside of them.

Boomer cannot die. Fuck the fact that Lindsey has human patients he should probably be attending. Screw that whole idea. Rook will not, cannot sit here while his dog goddamn dies.

“Hey,” Lindsey says, catching Rook’s expression maybe. The hard, determined set of it. “Hey, hey, he’s gonna be fine.”

“Yeah?” Rook asks.

“Yeah. You got him here as quick as you could. You did good by him, okay?”

“He saved my life.”

“Yeah,” Lindsey asks, grinning. He ruffles Boomer’s ears, strokes his hand down the dog’s back. “He’s a good boy. And he’s gonna be fine, right, Rook?”

Rook takes a breath, the first he’s really taken since stumbling in here with Boomer across his arms. His shoulders sag. His arms are trembling. “Right,” he says.

“Right. So go sit down for me over there, okay? And I’ll get to your arms just as soon as I’ve gotten Boomer all sewn up.”

Simple instructions. Said with an upswing. Talking Rook down from the panic attack he’d been circling. Rook turns the detail over within himself, how close he had been to freaking out, how skillfully Lindsey has dismantled it.

“You learn that in veterinarian school,” Rook asks. Later, after, when Doc Lindsey is pressing an alcohol swab to the rips in Rook’s forearms.

He blinks behind his glasses. “Huh?”

Rook makes a vague motion with his free hand. “Talking me out of that tailspin. They teach that before or after the courses on delivering baby cows?”

“Oh. Oh! Uhh. It’s actually right after ‘How Not to Get You Ass Chewed Up By Wolverines 101’,” he says. Grinning. The swab pushes into one of the cuts too deeply and both Rook and Lindsey hiss. “Sorry,” he says, pushing his glasses up his nose. Working the swab more gently.

“It was my ex, actually,” Lindsey says.

“Who taught you?”

“Sort of. He was uhh,” Lindsey licks his lips. He doesn’t correct himself.

Rook hadn’t realized. He keeps his face neutral, carefully shuttered. He knows the kind of backwater town Hope County is, figured it out pretty quick, he doesn’t want any sort of surprise in his expression to be read as any sort of condemnation.

“He dabbled,” Lindsey continues, “in psychology. A terrible waste of perfectly good mathematics degree, but he...he kinda treated it like a hobby, had all these little tricks.”

“Where was he when. When everything started?”

“Everything like Project at Eden’s Gate everything?”

Rook nods. His fingers twitch. What other everything is there? He doesn’t ask, but he wonders.

“Uhh.” Lindsey frowns. “He was. He was gone. He took off three—no two and half—yeah, two and half years ago now. Before things were as...dire as they are but uhh. Well quite a bit after they were no longer completely innocuous.”

Lindsey shrugs. He tosses the alcohol swab toward the waste basket, misses by a solid foot. Neither of them comment on it. Rook’s fingers rest on his own knee, the wounds clean, just waiting to be dressed.

“He just couldn’t take living with his head in the sand. I guess,” Lindsey says. Clearing his throat. Awkward. Rook gets it. He has nothing to offer in return.

Instead he says, “He just left you here?”

Doc Lindsey steps away. Licks his lips. A nervous little motion. “I didn’t want to go. And now look at me. Lead doctor for the Cougars. Pretty fancy stuff, huh?”

“You’re doing really good work, Doc.”

“You’re doing really good work, Rook. And so long as you need, I’ll keep putting the pieces back together again for you. Just do me a favor and next time you decide to tussle with a goddamn wolverine, maybe leave your dog out of it.”

Rook smiles, a little rueful, nods. He wonders if he should mention Faith. The reoccurring specter of her that he keeps seeing. The perfumed ghost that cannot be. Decided instead to say, “I never even wanted a dog. Growing up I couldn’t, apartment lifestyle, you know. And then later. I was uhh pretty serious with a guy but he was allergic so.”

He lets it drop, casual-like, the same way Lindsey had. Hoping to see that same surprised look, the refreshing quirk of Lindsey’s lips. The secret shared sameness.

“Well you got the best Hope County’s got to offer,” Lindsey says. He pulls the bandages tight, tight around Rook’s fingers. A doctor once more. Professionally warm. “Just, maybe let him rest for a week or so. Let him take it easy. The stitches will dissolve on their own but try not to let him chew on them too much.” 

Disappointed, trying not to show it, Rook nods. “I’ll try, Doc,” he says.

And he does try, and he mostly succeeds. He doesn’t take Boomer out again that week, leaves the whining, begging, stir crazy dog at Nick and Kim’s while he takes Hurk and Sharky out with him on adventures instead.

The argument could be made that Boomer is better company than the cousins.

Rook isn’t making that argument exactly, but he certainly feels like it has some merit as he’s dragging himself and Sharky into the prison’s backroom with an apologetic Hurk at his heels.

Sharky’s out cold, but he’s breathing, he’ll live. The new burns on Rook’s chest could almost have a heroic story behind them.

“Back again,” Lindsey says.

“Just can’t stay away, Doc,” Rook agrees. Maybe he’s laying it on thick. Too teasing. Lindsey clears his throat, pink-cheeked, he helps maneuver Sharky onto a cot in the corner.

“Needed to blow the wolverines up this time,” Lindsey asks. Medical salve stinging as he rubs it across Rook’s pec. The tingling bite of aloe in the abused flesh. Rubber gloves. Rook tries to remember if he wore gloves last time and fails.

“Weren’t no wolverines, Doc,” Hurk says from across the room. Too loud and too big for the cramped office space. “Was my fault. My dumbass three shits to the wind not keeping proper track a everyone’s position.” He does his best job at looking suitably guilty.

“It’s sheets to the wind,” Lindsey says. He adds nothing else.

“Ah yeah, right. That. Remind me, Rook, to keep it to four beers minimum if we’re gonna be going out huntin’ Peggies. And only shots on actually headshots,” Hurk says with a laugh. Good natured.

Rook chuckles.

Lindsey looks like he might have a stroke, eyes wide behind his glasses, cheeks pale.

Rook decides not to bring Sharky and Hurk around with him to the prison any more.

Which is difficult, considering he’s becoming somewhat of a regular face there. For the stupidest shit.

He and Grace have a run in with a really pissed off eagle. The raking claw marks on Rook’s bare shoulders don’t actually need stitches, but Grace insists so they go. 

“You know this wouldn’t happen if you actually wore a shirt,” Doc Lindsey offers.

Across the room, Grace rolls her eyes. 

“What,” Rook teases, flexing his abs, working the muscles in his pecs. “You want me to deny the world this glorious gun show?”

“It’s like talking to a wall, Doc,” Grace says, crossing her arms.

“But a really hot wall made of a perfect eight pack,” Rook shoots back. Lindsey grins just a little when Rook levels a wink at him. His eyes linger for longer than they should on the interplay of muscles in Rook’s chest and arms.

But he makes no other moves, offers nothing beyond a “Well please be careful,” as they leave.

And Rook is left with nothing to show for his efforts once more.

Rook shows up again two days later with a fishing fly stuck in his arm and a really good story to go with it too—it involves a bear and a trout and a group of unsuspecting Peggies—but Lindsey sighs when he sees him, and tips his head and says, “Again?” and Rook decides maybe it’s not the best time to tell it.

“Your burns are looking better at least,” Doc Lindsey says. “And its as good a time as any to practice my sutures.”

Rook grins. He’s gotten better at not grimacing as the needle pokes out of his skin, watching the gleam of it.

“How’s Boomer,” Lindsey asks.

“Chomping at the bit to get out of the house. Nick radios me daily to complain.”

“Poor guy.”

“Not really, spoiled rotten husband that guy. Kim’s a saint.”

“I meant Boomer,” Lindsey says. “I bet he misses you. Bet he’s worried.”

Rook hadn’t considered it. There’s too much to do around the county to simply stop in stasis while Boomer is out of commission.

“He’s a dog.”

“Dog’s are man’s best friend for a reason. Are you taking care of yourself, Rook?”

The needle pokes out. The skin pulls shut. Rook imagines he can feel it, even if he can’t. “Of course, Doc,” he says.

“I mean really. This is the third time in less than a week that you’ve...”

“Dumb accidents,” Rook says. “That’s all.” His fingers twitch as Lindsey slides the cold metal scissors tight against the final knot, as he snips it closed. Rook doesn’t have to imagine he can feel the numbed skin loosen, falling less taut than it had been.

He flexes his fist, gently, testing the stitches. “And I can’t stay away. Must be that bedside manner of yours.”

Lindsey huffs. “My bedside manner. Horses and cows aren’t really judges of that kind of stuff you know.”

“I wasn’t being sarcastic.”

“No?”

Rook narrows his eyes. “Nope,” he says.

Lindsey fidgets. The scissors turning over and over in his hand. Slick and silver in the harsh medical spotlight Lindsey had pulled down to work. “Well, thanks, I guess,” he says.

Rook blows his own frustrated breath between his teeth. “Hey look, you’re welcome but like—Am I doing something wrong here or?”

“Other than running a major risk of tetanus or rabies not that I can tell. Are you up-to-date on your shots, Rook?”

“You’re fucking kidding me, right?”

Lindsey blinks, owlish.

“How many more hints do I have to drop here, Charles?”

The doctor blinks again. Then he starts, eyes widening. Cheeks flushing. The scissors spin even more erratically until Rook raises a hand and takes them from Lindsey’s fingers. “Oh. Oh. Do you—so you did mean it as flirting?” he says.

A question? God, god how is it a question?

“I don’t just flash my tits for all the small town doctors, you know. Press gang serviced veterinarians.”

“Hardly press ganged,” Lindsey says. He bites his lip. Bites it until it goes white when Rook squeezes his pecs with his upper arms and flaunts them. “I-I-I thought maybe you had said he so that I...I wouldn’t feel bad about-about it. Small town prejudices, you know?”

“That makes no sense,” Rook says.

Lindsey shrugs. “I know,” he says, “but I just didn’t think—I mean I’m not. You know, Richard took the reigns on the whole,” he moves his hands, searching for the word, settles on the obvious, “relationship thing.”

“You don’t say.”

Lindsey makes a waffling motion with his hands. Good thing he isn’t holding the scissors any more, could poke an eye out, except for the fact that both his are safe behind glass. Rook places the scissors on the bed, mirrors the motion of Lindsey’s hands.

“So you want me to take charge here then,” he asks.

“It would match with your rather brash and foolhardy nature, wouldn’t it?”

Before Hope County, Rook would not have considered himself either of those things. Wolverines and bears and county menaces both Boshaw and Drubman have kind of proven him otherwise.

Rook rolls his shoulders, stands.

They aren’t that different in height, though Lindsey actually has an inch on him. Doesn’t feel like it when Rook’s always looking up at him from a medical bed anyway.

Lindsey’s gaze keeps flickering between Rook’s lips and his eyes. Back and forth, back and forth. “You’re really too attractive,” Lindsey says.

Rook’s ego doesn’t need the compliment, never has. He accepts it as gracefully as he knows how; flexing his pectorals again so they jump. Stretch and move.

He’s got a hand on Lindsey’s wrist, keeping the doctor from squirming too far away. Not that he seems to be trying to. Body arched toward Rook’s in a stance that screams both tacky romance novel and complete surrender.

No talk of terms.

No negotiations.

Rook closes the distance between them, presses his lips to Lindsey’s in a quick, chaste and juvenile kiss. His fingers tightening just slightly on the bones within his grip.

Then he lets go, steps away, watches the way Lindsey sways slightly into the space he had occupied.

“Let’s go on a date,” Rook says. “Tomorrow.”

Lindsey splutters, fixes his glasses from where they have slid down his nose. “A date,” he echoes. He palms his own hair, pulling on the top pieces until they spill over his forehead. “Yeah okay, sure,” he says.

Rook grins. “It’ll be great.”

“Why do I have the feeling we’re gonna get shot at?”

Rook leans back against the medical table. Drops his shoulder to accentuate the long, lean lines of himself. “Shot at? Pft. Absolutely not.”

**Author's Note:**

> There’s PROBABLY gonna be a part 2 maybe. I don’t even know. Once I’m done commissions I’m coming back here and we’re gonna get back to the regularly scheduled angst. Okay? Okay.


End file.
